'Inclusive exclusion': managing identity for the nation's sake in Aotearoa/New Zealand.

The threat that fast-moving processes of 'globalization' pose to the nation, whether as shifting markets, more cheaply produced goods, new technologies, or regional alliances, nowadays motivates calls from all quarters that we be more competitive, entrepreneurial, innovative, excellent. But globalization is a curious 'threat' given that the nation was founded on the back of the globalizing British Empire. The desire behind this call to get on board Team New Zealand or to invest in New Zealand Inc. is hardly very new. The economic viability of 'New Zealand' has always been an issue--the idea that we 'export or die'--and establishes the reductive core of its national identity. Thinking about settler society in a local historical and global context, I consider the economic basis of New Zealand's national identity: I question the basis of popular national chauvinism, or at least the local management of it; and I ask whether 'our' history provides ways of thinking about identity and belonging that might work better for everyone than an increasingly branded citizenship--that is, an identity which you consume, like any other kind of goods.

I attend in particular to the prior difference in a 'new' country of indigenous people--the primary or base story of settler societies--that not only frames what I call a political economy of identity, but shapes, significantly, the future of the same place. The creeping 'maorification' of the public domain, despite ongoing vilification of special Maori rights, as against the rights of other New Zealanders, is self-evident (there is a real attempt in the media, for instance, to pronounce Maori words properly, and widespread acceptance of a role for Maori protocol in public life). The corollary of attending to a prior difference is not, I think, Maori separatism (dreadful to non-Maori), or Maori victimhood and guilty white colonialism, or white indigeneity (both disempowering for Maori). That said, one can hardly say 'first peoples' in New Zealand nowadays without getting an emotive and reactive response. The overdetermined response to 'first' anything at the very least indicates the force and charge of a long local history and, more deeply, illustrates a political economy or structure of national identity. I think there is much to be gained, given the increasing cultural diversity of my own neighbourhood in New Zealand, by recalling, and regaining, multiple modes of identity and belonging, and by softening the passive-aggressive posture of national identity--a posture which starts with a do-not-give-em-anything attitude towards tangata whenua (the local people of a place or people-place) and extends to other local people whose identities may not be based first and foremost in the nation.

Accepting that New Zealand has been an exemplary agent of 'globalizing processes', and that Anglo-settler societies continue to play a significant role in the current global order (or disorder), might make 'us' feel less threatened, and less prone to the knowledge-economy-speak of the national managers of the country. It might just make us less reactive, insecure and aggressive, all at once, and more open to the reality--the real differences and dynamism--of 'our' place.

Short History and Coming After

For settler societies the most intractable difference is anterior; someone was here before you and makes a claim to place on that basis. The sense of some other people and a different kind of place existing before you arrived which you then make your 'own' is what makes a settler society a settler society. (1) This original relation to place is the object, in New Zealand, of an 'inclusive exclusion': the condition of the nation-state's inclusion of anyone within its territory is the exclusion of non-national modes of identity and belonging, that is, of modes of identity and belonging that are not in the first instance related to the nation-state (so you are a New Zealander or Kiwi first, and whatever else you take yourself to be second). In this way, making a new country, resettling it, involves putting an older, longer history of place away or behind. Settler societies of new countries are oriented toward the future, not to the past of the place in which settlers find themselves. Meanwhile, correspondences between the present time and past of place--for instance, the intimate local knowledge that tangata whenua have of taniwha (spirit-ancestors associated with water)--recall the long or longer history of Maori inhabitation, stretch and warp the public domain of the nation-state, and suggest anterior grounds of place, anterior modes of understanding and inhabiting it.

I contrast the long or longer history of Maori occupation with the short, or shorter history of non-Maori settlement and a sense of identity and belonging--a need to identify oneself with the place, to belong here--that is based on short history alone. The relation of 'long' and short history at once precedes official biculturalism, and contests the view, based on de facto multiculturalism, that Maori difference is a 'cultural' difference which is more or less equivalent, or of equal weight and bearing, to other cultural differences. Multiculturalism, which might reasonably be offered as a counter-model of this settler society, reduces tangata whenua to the status of any other kind of people within the nation-state. The greater problem, however, from the point of view of a political economy of identity, is that both these models of a new country or settler society are circumscribed by the nation-state, and demarcate a national or nation-based identity. That is, in both models, differences of place are conceived in terms of the already existing nation, so that cultural differences are differences for the nation's sake, and otherwise have no foundation, or even reality, much less do they found alternative conceptions of place. This is the spike of Maori sovereignty.

The quasi-constitutional nature of the Treaty of Waitangi is symptomatic of the settler logic of conditional inclusion: the Treaty makes Maori fundamental to the constitution of the nation, and secures the authority of the new nation-state. It is referred to in individual acts of legislation, but nowhere does it explicitly empower the New Zealand government to make law. Nor does the government necessarily feel bound by the Treaty in making law (there is currently a movement on the parliamentary Right to remove existing references to the Treaty). The New Zealand Crown, as the law-making body is called, can decide whether or not it is acting under the auspices of the Treaty, whether, indeed, the Treaty in fact binds its actions (the Crown in New Zealand, despite the popular rhetoric of the Treaty of Waitangi, is historically the self-constituted entity of the second settlers). The uncertain status of the Treaty as a fully constitutional document thus negates the actually independent political status of Maori at the time of signing, and deprives the difference of being Maori for Maori, as opposed to being Maori for the nation's sake, of any political effect. So Maori are included in foundational claims to the settlement of the nation and the establishment of an authoritative law-making body--the Crown of New Zealand--but any claim Maori might make independently of the established nation is nullified by the Crown's refusal to accept that the document is a fully constitutional document that grounds its own authority. The Treaty is a working fiction for settlers, but a real political agreement for Maori whose ancestors signed it.

The 'inclusive exclusion' of official biculturalism, since this model of national identity was adopted in the 1980s, marks the cultural managerialism of an increasingly independent or 'independence'-minded settler nation. Considered globally, the main way in which the identity of the majority of the world's peoples is organized, or marked, at least politically or socially, and despite much talk of the end of the 'Westphalian era', is in terms of the national (2) (non-nationals include intra-national peoples, that is, first peoples or first nations and stateless peoples, and extra-nationals, that is, migrants, refugees and resident aliens). Put differently, no thesis of the 'end of the nation' has had quite the impact of the idea of the 'end of history'. Multinational capitalism has turned the national from an idea of the soul, spirit or essence of a people, a pre-given identity, into a mechanism for manufacturing or reinventing home, community and loyalty; something that is consumed, or consumable, like other kinds of goods. In marketing-speak the nation is what Kevin Roberts, CEO of Saatchi and Saatchi Worldwide, and committed New Zealander, would call a 'lovemark'. (3)

This process of invention marks the whole of the short or shorter histories of new countries, and is no more new or recent than globalization itself (which is after all contemporaneous with the settlement of 'new' countries). So the settler society of a new country, lacking any attachment to the history of the place in which it is founded--a place that predates the settler's conception of it--establishes an historical free trade zone, relatively unbeholden to local law or customs, in which an identity or mode of belonging is manufactured, alongside other goods, to secure a viable economy. The point of manufacturing an idea of place was, and remains, to secure the new country by amassing more settlers, consolidating a settler society by swamping first peoples.

A person whose identity primarily derives from identification with the nation of New Zealand, as opposed to any primarily non-national identification (whether Muslim, Kurd or local Tuhoe), is commonly called 'Kiwi'. Kiwi designates a kind of cultural capital. You get credit for being a Kiwi; it is a good thing to be, and to want to be. Kiwi not only denominates a New Zealander; it is the denomination, as cultural capital, of the New Zealander--a popular national conception of identity that is also corporatized, media-driven and government-sponsored. This identity or idea of belonging is driven by the business of New Zealand, or, more deeply, by the idea that New Zealand is a business--a corporation, or corporate body, whose members are, will be, and ought to be, New Zealanders, today 'Kiwis'. National managers, who manage investment capital on the nation's behalf, now manage and market culture too, shaped or packaged for purposes of attracting investment. (4) Cultural managerialism extends from the initiatives of government policy through the products of cultural industries to university research projects, funded by their fit with national indices of enterprise, innovation, competitiveness, 'creativity' and excellence. This now commonplace discourse is global, but extends, locally, to a politics of identity and belonging whose historical basis is fully and reductively economic.

The management of culture is, importantly, a management of the terms of the race debate, mainly to reduce claims upon the state of a history of place older than the state itself. So we see in New Zealand the expropriation of Maori difference in and through the discourse of that difference, which is the elevation--the public approval--of being Maori for the nation's sake, the corresponding disapproval of being Maori primarily for the sake of Maori, say Tuhoe, and a simultaneous reduction of Maori to the equivalent status of any other kind of New Zealander. One might ask why this is not a positive thing for New Zealand, for all New Zealanders, which includes Maori New Zealanders. Why is not national identity, and getting everyone in the place to sign up to it, for all our sakes, not simply a good thing?

Being able to express who you take yourself to be is an aspect of freedom, or well-being, that is fundamental to democracy. The different ways in which peoples of New Zealand inhabit the place, and relate to it, constitute its real wealth--a wealth of being--so that the reduction of place to culture (and criticism) for the nation's sake, a singular identity for selling New Zealand, hollows out multiple modes of belonging and relating to place. Rather than an 'inclusive exclusion' of peoples within New Zealand--you are included only if you reject non-national modes of belonging--I suggest the inclusion of the multiple aspects of the identities of those same citizens. That way, you get a much richer and more real sense of place. An economy of identity otherwise produces contradictions, or pathologies of settlement, that the idea of one nation, one law, one mode of belonging, and relating to the place, cannot explain, or contain.

At the level of popular rhetoric the management of national culture involves an assertion of the 'equivalence' and continuity of all people of New Zealand. Maori today are 'colonists' and 'migrants', just the same as any other settlers (5)--they merely migrated a little earlier and 'colonized' the land--while non-Maori settlers may describe themselves as indigenous or white natives. (6) This popular discourse works to quash a different historical experience of place and to reduce claims to place based on that experience. While talk of 'tangata whenua', which differentiates Maori according to history and region, continues to provoke non-Maori, who prefer the less threatening all-the-same 'Maori', there is no popular language of first peoples or first nations, as the difference between first and second, and any notion of firstness, is nullified. As Maori were no less 'colonists' than the second settlers, the word 'invasion' is also ruled out of public discourse. The charge of other contentious words is similarly defused: the word 'holocaust', which caused a public outcry when it was used by Tariana Turia (today the co-leader of the Maori Party in the New Zealand parliament) to describe the effect of white settlement, (7) has since been (re)applied to the early 19th-century inter- Maori musket wars (8)--an earlier 'holocaust' and seeming act of self-genocide that implicitly, and retroactively, justifies British intervention.

A potential economy that is based on an evolving idea of people and place is a political economy of identity. The short history of settler society follows individual investment in an idea of place--the nation to come--that is economic and prospective. Although the conception of the new country changes (from 'better Britain' to 'New Zealand Inc.' (9)), basing the place in an idea of its economic possibility remains constant. The drive of settler society, internalized by settlers, has always been to get more settlers to come and to stay--to commit to an idea of place that their staying in it would make real; making, for instance, a place considered a 'better Britain' truly better than Britain. This helps to explain why commitment to New Zealand can make you a New Zealander, for the commitment itself, historically, made New Zealand what it came to be, so that if you leave you are no longer a New Zealander, or not one to the same degree. For New Zealanders the importance of commitment to place may be so strong that this, in itself, makes them indigenous. (10)

The Kiwi, as a popular concept of identity and belonging, refers to something more than the natural emergence, over time, of the character of an inhabitant of place; it is the necessary basis of a viable nation-state in a globalizing context where national status secures multinational investment capital. For national culture, or culture for the nation's sake, is now managed on this basis. While off-ground, 'transcendental' capital (11) needs the acquiescence of the nation-state, a national identity is needed to keep the nation afloat--to actually 'float' the nation on a world market--and attractive to further investment. Hence the construction of the Kiwi, the concurrent marking of aliens in our midst--new migrants, refugees, non-patriots, or those otherwise uninvested in the enterprise of New Zealand Inc.--and the construction of a new country as a habitat of this manufactured and mystical creature.

The natural habitat of the Kiwi, and here of course I do not mean actual New Zealanders, is the wilderness of 'our' national recreation parks and the virtual landscape of the 100 per cent Pure New Zealand tourist board campaign. Considered in terms of an ongoing 'campaign' of settlement--a project to sell the country and thereby settle it--the cultural industries work to erase or cleanse long history. Without this culture-work the making of a new country could not properly proceed. The mystical Kiwi, not the actual native bird but the manufactured national icon of short settler history, history cleansing and globalizing economy, is the cultural capital of the political economy of settler identity.

The post-cultural Kiwi, that is, the manufactured, media-driven identity of culture for the nation's sake, is not an instance of identity politics, usually associated with minority groups and vilified in the popular press as divisive and politically correct. Rather, it is a post-identity, a marketed entity, or product, which has been detached, for good settler reasons, from long history. The identity arises from establishing in the short history of New Zealand a viable market, for, among other things, an identity. Hence the economic basis of a national New Zealand identity (the mundane materialism of the 'Kiwi lifestyle', I am suggesting, goes to the bottom of the identity itself). Today, the Kiwi is the very currency of the local cultural industries--the local nexus of sport, tourism and telenationalism. It must be said that Maori identity too, like anything else, has accrued significant value in the global marketplace, and in the context of a self-indigenizing nation--the brand value of the haka-nation--there is much debate about the property rights and proper usage of things Maori. (12) What stops things Maori, however, from being simply for profit, and Maori identity from simply being an identity-for-profit, is the weight and bearing of long histories anchored in law-giving systems of value. (13) Despite the rise of cultural rights on the back of broader based rights to self-determination, I do not understand things Maori (Maoritanga) as a segregated or unmixed culture so much as a place-based natural law, so that the prior difference that must be negotiated is political as much as cultural--a difference of first law, and the claim that inheres in it to the place. (14)

As a denomination of cultural exchange, being 'Kiwi' works to expropriate non-national modes of identification and belonging. Identities that are not primarily based in the nation challenge the New Zealand dream of a postcolonial, independent nationhood. It is simpler to say that if the Kiwi did not exist you would have to make up him or her, because a new country is not yet one without a character, an identity. The problem of national 'culture', whether conceived in bicultural or multicultural terms, is that the differences it encompasses remain for the nation's sake. Yet the primary, because prior, difference on which the nation depends--and here is the contradiction of a political economy of settler identity--is not, at base, national.

The displacement of biculturalism by multiculturalism (in any case a de facto reality) might resolve the problem of what kind of place we live in--might meet the great need, due to short history, to identify with it, to belong here--except that embracing multiculturalism (officially or unofficially) is a further example of inclusive exclusion. For this displacement is itself driven by an idea of national culture, not by any idea that differences that exist beyond an idea of a nation might be valuable in and of themselves, quite apart from a nation-based idea of identity and belonging. Hence I am suggesting a different conception of the 'wealth' of the nation that is based in the actual richness, variety, abundance of its internal differences, histories, peoples.

In New Zealand it is hard to think there are many peoples here, as opposed to there being a single people--New Zealanders or Kiwis. At the same time, and this is what I think drives this fretful identification, this fretful sameness, (15) we cannot escape an originary difference, a primary, because prior, difference. This 'firstness' is the problem that Maori for the nation-state--'our' Maori or Maori-for-you--does not fully explain the original, primary or prior presence of Maori. Maori difference is simply couched in national terms, as if Maori, as they must be for the nation's sake, have all along been all of a piece--for all our sakes.

That is, 'Maori' does not explain or properly 'speak' in the multiple terms of tangata whenua, the peoples who many Maori still take themselves to be, anymore than I think Kiwi, a composite figure of received and often recited characteristics, (16) 'speaks' the different kinds of people that New Zealanders actually are. The self-understanding of Maori is properly understood in and through a sense of long history, creating a problem for there being simply, or only, a national culture. Older Maori networks or, more properly, genealogies, themselves intricately interwoven, are of course now intermixed with non-Maori networks through the short history of second settlement. So the complex interelationships among the first-corners is now overlaid and interwoven with the complex relations among first and second corners. This means that everyone is now Kiwi, but that not everyone is simply, only, Kiwi. We know this because Maori identity is not a national identity. Long history ensures that Maori identities both precede and exceed the nation-based identity of Kiwi.

But what is the point of this excess, or abundance--the excess of being-before, over and above the national? The primary, because prior, difference of Maori allows us to see the logic and the function of a political economy of identity: that logic is the inclusive exclusion of difference, and the function is the consolidation of investment in the idea of the nation. It allows us to see how the idea of being Kiwi manages and distributes the wealth of the nation; I mean 'wealth' in the broadest sense of culture, as a source of pride, power, prosperity, a bright future. But the primary difference of Maori also questions the reduction of the real wealth of place, of well-being in the sense of being able to express a different relation to place, to national indices of well-being. Freedom in this sense of well-being is also a fundamental good. I might be 'wealthy' in ways that precede and exceed the national idea of well-being, which is being Kiwi. This is not just true of Maori.

Long History and Being-Before

In the 19th century the prospective nation of New Zealand required the disembedding and reconstruction of long history for the sake of future settlers--for the future of the settlement. Consider, in this regard, the original 'prospect' of the new country constructed through artistic accounts of a picturesque, welcoming and docile country. (17) Long history, however, is not amenable to its reconstruction by short history. Yet the prospect of New Zealand as a now bicultural country has come to depend on this 'difference'. So we are driven by a political economy of identity to face the different future opened up for all of us by long history--by living in an actually old new country.

Historically, Maori 'culture' breaks down into multiple peoples, and into the multiple modes of address of tangata whenua (moving across tribal, urban and pan-tribal collectives); what is 'Maori', then, is a shifting assembly of peoples. Maori are not simply Maori-for-you, or Maori-for-me, which is an identity of managed national culture--the compulsory Maori of the nation-state. Maori are also intrahistorical--that is, Maori to and for Maori, in myriad local ways (the very meaning of tangata whenua), which relate and crisscross first and second worlds of settlement ('indigenous' is not then reducible to an imagined pre-contact world but encompasses the conjoined world of first and second settlement). Acknowledging this difference--a different but not equivalent difference--is to conceive non-national modes of identity and belonging, or better, modes of relating to people and place inside the nation-state that cannot be conceived in national terms. (18) The difference of first peoples is not the same as that of second settlers, hence the valuable purchase, or cultural capital, for non-Maori, of being or becoming indigenous. The difference between short and long history means that people do not simply relate to the place, or to each other in it, in terms mediated by the cultural managerialism of the nation-state.

Long history opens out a place in which social relations are not simply proscribed or circumscribed by the imperatives of a political economy of identity. The difference, for instance, between tangata whenua (the local people of a place or people-place) and tauiwi (foreigners) suggests intra-national modes of relating to the place that bridge long and short history and suggest the real, historical grounds of shared space. Meanwhile, the official national binary, Maori-Pakeha, works to secure the authority of a nation-state and a popular national identity while eliding the intra-national Maori difference on which it depends. This logic of inclusive exclusion underpins the citizen-consumer of local cultural managerialism--'Kiwi' for short--and works to make different kinds of difference equivalent and long history immaterial or irrelevant to globalizing processes. The business of settling a country, needless to say, is never over and done with. It is continued by the energetic reenactment of settler history, from re-staging the Treaty signing (with great fanfare in 1990 for its 150th anniversary) to popular television history (whether Frontier of Dreams, a national history, or Pioneer House, an RTV program). In an economy of identity, the history of settlement, and the basis it provides for identity and belonging, is everyone's business; for cultural managers it is the business of NZ Inc.

For tangata whenua, the time of long history in New Zealand and the place where one stands (turangawaewae) correspond. For non-Maori the authority of the nation-state, and the national identity and sense of belonging that it secures, fences off intra-national claims to place based on a history of occupation that is longer, and older, than the history of their own settlement. Everyday 'correspondences' of the time of long history and a local sense of place, for instance the appearance of taniwha, (19) trouble the short history of non-Maori settlement and the orientation toward the future of the settler state. Where the knowledge of taniwha identify local people as people of long history, it is long history, rather than the taniwha itself, that constitutes the real threat, and disturbance, to the nation-state and national identity (settler outrage at taniwha usually focuses on the belief in the existence of the creature as a form of primitive superstition and not on claims to place based on knowledge of long history). Taniwha are tipua (ancestors), wellsprings of long history, which confront, obstruct and thus infuriate the Leviathan of settlement. Such correspondences unsettle, or de-settle, the grounds of the public domain. The place is not then the hard, footsure reality of the second settlers' knowledge of it, which is based on their own short history. The numerous histories of New Zealand written by second settlers, (20) which ground their own presence in the place, are the product of institutionalized history--an intellectual and ideological infrastructure that is no less necessary to the construction of the nation-state and to securing national identity than physical 'public works'.

So the history of place conceived in terms of an existing nation-state, after the fact, works to consolidate and confirm the reality of the place of short history, but the political economy of identity, whose history the narratives of settlement inscribe, produces pathologies of identity and belonging that cannot be resolved in national terms. Short history cannot resolve the paradox of indigeneity, which is to do with anteriority or 'being-before'. That is, settlers take as their model of identity and belonging the prior terms of indigenous peoples. So non-Maori do not claim that being indigenous does not matter. In such a case indigenous peoples would have to have disappeared, or been removed, altogether. Rather, they tend nowadays to claim, as against tangata whenua, that they, the non-Maori settlers, are indigenous too. (21) But being indigenous is to do with anteriority, being-before, and involves an original claim to land--a primary claim because prior--and the assertion on that basis of a special relationship to it. The distinctive difference of being-before, which is the model for non-Maori settlers' claim to place, is extinguished as the basis of any model of identity, including that of the second settlers, by their own claim to this very same distinction--to be indigenous too.

Put simply, either Maori are indigenous or nobody is. The 'inclusive exclusion' of the nation-state and an exclusively nation-based identity thus removes or elides the grounds of the authority of the nation-state and occludes in that process intra-national modes of relating to the place and prior historical conceptions of identity and belonging.

If Maori are a product of relations stretching back over time and across space--long history includes and subsumes short history--then Maori are as modern as not. The local difficulty is that Maori are modern, but unlike non-Maori settlers they are not simply modern, not simply therefore the legal, anthropological entity of the modern settler state's administration of 'them' (the natives) (22)--and not simply the object of the post-contact term 'Maori'. The new country for Maori is an old country too; so the super-reality of a Maori place, commonly referenced nowadays as Aotearoa, exceeds the nationalized territory of the settler state and the short history which grounds its authority. Maori identities are intra-national and national, hence the super-cultural and supra-cultural formations of settler societies. Maori, as a result, cannot adequately be conceived in the modern, legal, anthropological frameworks of short history. The 'frozen' Maori of tradition is still evident, for instance, in the cultural policy of government. The Foreshore and Seabed Act of 2004--to provide a powerful instance of retrograde anthropology at work in government legislation--restricted Maori access to the lake and seashore to 'customary' or traditional usage. (23) The compulsory Maori, conceived in terms of custom and tradition, was needed to secure national territory and the national identity associated with it. The legislation preserves the 'right' to beaches, as the Prime Minister had promised, of all New Zealanders, (24) although it was entirely unclear that anyone's access was being threatened by claims of tangata whenua, and despite already existing restriction to parts of the New Zealand foreshore due to private ownership.

As against the logic of inclusive exclusion, which defines a political economy of identity--that is, identity defined first and foremost by a relation to the would-be nation, or nation-to-come and not to history, which subsumes the national--I argue for a better, more deeply grounded account of settler societies. On the one hand, such an account would acknowledge the evident weight and bearing of long history; on the other, it would consider the nature of the investment in new countries of global Anglo-settlement--at once psychological, existential, financial--and the fantasy of place that the settler's desire, anxiety, even sense of loss (of the Mother country) construct. It would consider the longing to belong as an aspect of settlement too, rather than cause for reactionary dismissal of indigenous difference. It would consider whether words for describing the event of settlement from an indigenous point of view ('invasion' or 'holocaust'), and which have been ruled out of order in the public domain, might bear thinking about. The point is not to deny that non-Maori New Zealanders belong too--there are many ways of belonging--but that it is illegitimate, ahistorical and pathological for second settlers to claim that they are indigenous too.

If, in fact, we are all indigenous now, then there is, strictly speaking, no 'indigenous' point of view, just different kinds of New Zealanders (people whose differences are equivalent). So the difference of a Maori New Zealander is no different in kind from the difference of a Chinese New Zealander. Needless to say a rich history is erased along with non-equivalent differences--that is, a sense that the difference between first and second peoples is a different kind of difference. This is not merely a local problem. With the loss of any sense of different kinds of difference, we approach the ahistorical hypostasizing of difference characteristic of liberal multiculturalism and the academic talk of respect for the other which accompanies it (the actual emptiness of respect for other peoples is felt, I think, in the jargon of 'the Other': a reified, abstract and absolute difference that suggests no particular face or place).

The erasure of different kinds of difference may make us all the same, and all the greater for it--a Kiwi Nation--but popular national chauvinism hides a longing to belong, an understandable but unreflective identity-envy. A short history of trying to erase Maori difference might make this envy seem peculiar. But Maori have all along had something the second settlers increasingly wanted: to belong here and nowhere else. The settler response has been to appropriate Maoriness for this purpose, and thus to erase the distinction between first and second peoples, so that we all belong in just the same way.

I have argued that the management of culture for the nation's sake, which is for all our sakes, actually impoverishes the nation; it reduces the different kinds of people New Zealanders actually are, and limits the freedom to expand what New Zealanders might also be. An identity is not, more strongly, something you can have because you want it--something arising from commitment--at least in the ordinary sense of the word. You cannot be Maori just because you want to be, or Chinese because you want to be, and so on (though you might try). Equally, you do not stop being Maori, Chinese or a New Zealander (or at once Maori and Chinese and a New Zealander) through lack of commitment, or loyalty. That being Kiwi might depend on loyalty imposes a false idea of identity, involving some ostracism of New Zealanders who have 'left', as if deserted, the country. For an identity, albeit constructed, multiple, open-ended and evolving, is something you also already have: the place you are in is a place you already relate to in some way, and some people in it are people you already identify with, or may be identified with. Such modes of relation are already place-based modes of belonging, and conceivable community. The culture of settler societies is obviously additive, and includes new ways of identifying with place through the development of new communities of it. The Kiwi nation, however, subtracts difference to isolate, protect and project the same identity for all, hence the compulsory nationalism of second settlement. Being Maori for the nation's sake makes being Kiwi for everyone else compulsory.

Admitting the break between short and long history, and the difference between first and second settlers, legitimates other ways of being different, or differently placed, in New Zealand. To recognize tangata whenua--being Maori for Maori--does not mean that Maori are simply getting 'special rights'; for Maori offer a redefinition, through tikanga, of what 'right' means (doing right, what is tika, animates a set of values, (25) not property rights in the western legal sense). Thus Maori add value, or rather values, to existing law. If Maori identity and belonging adds to 'the wealth' of the nation, the value of being Maori for the sake of Maori remains nevertheless hard to argue in the public domain. In the popular press a truly indigenous point of view in New Zealand is commonly thought to be a thing of the past--we are all mixed up together now (26)--and a good thing too, given a long history of cannibalism, violent warfare, slavery, primitive practices, the persisting sexism of Maori protocol and all the rest of it.

This kind of response to intractable local differences is part and parcel of an ahistorical sense of globalization and, as we have seen, tends to generate clashes of culture or even of civilizations (bigger bundles of culture) whose differences globalization is at the same time supposed to be making redundant. Settling new countries, of course, belongs to the real history of globalization. And in the global space stretching from new to old countries, short to long history, identity and belonging is no less important than it ever was; indeed for settlers it tends to become more important, because the new country, following the logic of an economy of identity, is also a market entity. The national identity that the new country establishes, and which it is also established upon, becomes increasingly important. So settler identity, at first rooted in the mother country, then increasingly the independent product of the new country, depends on the viability of the new country's economy. With the cultural turn of global economy, and the marketing of identity, along with all kinds of goods, non-Maori no longer expect Maori to disappear. Rather Maori is made to work for you and me--to brand New Zealand. What actually is Maori then becomes an issue for everyone. And what being Maori means to Maori, if this is a difference that is significant to you, brings--in brings back--long history.

In a global economy which merges culture and communications, long history marks a profound contradiction (the excess of nonequivalent differences within the settler nation-state). If the global economy makes non-national differences a local issue everywhere, thanks to the increasing visibility of migrants, refugees, indigenous and stateless peoples, it also demands non-national means of negotiating them. Long history offers a way of thinking about common space that does not take everyone in it to be the same, and does not assume, and therefore require, enforcing an equalizing of difference under the auspices of liberal democracy. While long history is diminished by the refusal of non-Maori to accept as their terms of governance the articles of the Treaty of Waitangi, it also suggests the basis of reconstructed governance. The Treaty is a broken trust, but underscores, nevertheless, the need for trust in governance and, importantly, the very idea of government as a trust. I participate in a national community, understood as a treaty-like social contract, on the assumption that my well-being--including the capacity to express who I take myself to be as a fundamental aspect of my freedom--will be secured by my doing so. Sovereignty, where people claim it, or seek it, registers more or less the security of one's trust in government. (27) Because non-Maori in New Zealand do not accept governance in this sense of trust, and continue to unilaterally administer Maori claims to resources, so the wealth of the nation, at least in terms of the well-being or freedom of all other citizens, is also not secured.

In New Zealand the long history of tangata whenua remains key to a sense of common or shared space, but not as Maori-for-you or -me, that is, Maori for the nation's sake, because it is the originary exclusion of anteriority, the primarily different difference of settler societies, that motivates an economic reduction, settler pathologies of self-indigenization, and ongoing hostility to first peoples and recent migrants. If the structure of an economy of identity makes tangata whenua a national threat, it also enables hostility toward Maori to move easily to any kind of non-national or migrant, even when hostility toward Maori is shared by migrants themselves. Culture for the sake of the nation, whether the investment in national culture is private or public, generates a structure of identification--hence a political economy--that works to exclude migrants too. In this way, intra- and extra-national differences are structurally related within a culture that is managed for the nation's sake. Different kinds of difference are extinguished, to be replaced by the pseudo- or anti-politics of managed culture, and the projection of a common culture that is majority-determined and unilateral.

In the settler nation today a homeland, community, or society--the basis of any sense of identity and belonging--cannot simply be a projection of a common sense of difference; for that common space will be differently phrased by peoples in and of it. Nor does a common space suffer from there being different senses of it, or become any less a common space. The difference of first peoples, for instance, rather than reducing and/or fragmenting the nation through claims upon the state, in fact makes a country which acknowledges the difference comparatively 'wealthy'. The country is relatively impoverished, on the contrary, to the extent that Maori difference is extinguished as a condition of the national conversation with non-Maori. Sovereignty in the sense of trust is of course an ideal, but the drive to recognition on one's own terms is never immaterial to national conversations. So I distinguish people of New Zealand from New Zealanders as the single or singular people of the place. (28) Such a place would be truly hospitable, its people truly sovereign, its principles truly democratic. It is this sense of non-national differences within the nation-state with which the national managers of globalization need to come to terms, if we do not actually prefer a nation-state of passive-aggressive insecurity and recurrent historical emergency.

(1.) Here I add a sense of long history to the basic distinction between 'colonization' and 'colonialism', which separates colonial societies on a European model from societies over which European control is asserted for a time. See D. K. Fieldhouse, Colonialism 1870-1945: An Introduction, New York, St Martin's Press, 1981. The 'difference' that concerns me here, between peoples 'coming after' and peoples 'being before', highlights the temporality of societies of colonization.

(2.) In A. Gupta and J. Ferguson (eds), Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology (Durham and London, Duke University Press, 1997), the editors ask 'why nation-states have become the dominant form of organising space in the contemporary world as well as what challenges other forms of imagining community and constructing identity-transnational, international, or subnational--might offer nationalism at the present time' (p. 17). Gupta's own essay in this collection ('The Song of the Non-aligned World: Transnational Identities and the Reinscription of Space in Late Capitalism', pp. 179-202) suspends the national through consideration of subnational and supranational identities. To this I add the temporal dimension of settlement, which is the relation of first and second peoples understood as a difference of authority and rights, or first law.

(3.) See K. Roberts, Lovemarks: The Future Beyond Brands, New York, Powerhouse Books, 2004. For Roberts a successful brand today is a sign of trust, and, more strongly, love on the part of the customer. 'Trustmarks', or better, 'lovemarks', are products 'created and owned by people who love them', which express a 'loyalty beyond reason', hence an enduring brand. Roberts' vision of New Zealand itself in these terms, elaborated through stories, images and talk of New Zealand and New Zealanders, including his own speeches, can be found at <www.nzedge.com>.

(4.) See G. Hage, 'Transcendental Capitalism and the Roots of Paranoid Nationalism', Against Paranoid Nationalism: Searching for Hope in a Shrinking Society, Sydney, Pluto Press; for United Kingdom, Europe and Canada, Merlin Press, 2003, pp. 7-21.

(5.) This is the vocabulary of the popular national history series Frontier of Dreams, TV1, New Zealand, 2005, directed by Ray Waru and Vincent Burke, sponsored by the Ministry of Culture and Heritage and a good indicator of current rhetoric of settlement. The book of the series, compiled by leading local historians, the majority of whom work for the Ministry, is B. Dalley and G. Mclean (eds), Frontier of Dreams: The Story of New Zealand, Auckland, Hodder Moa, 2006.

(6.) Notably bestselling author Michael King in Being Pakeha Now: Reflections and Recollections of a White Native, 2nd edn, Auckland, Penguin, 1999.

(7.) In a speech to the New Zealand Psychological Society in August, 2000.

(8.) According to Michael King, 'If any chapter in New Zealand history has earned the label "holocaust", it is this one', The Penguin History of New Zealand, Auckland, Penguin, 2003, p. 134.

(9.) For discussion of the former, see G. Park, 'Going Between Goddesses', in K. Neumann, N. Thomas and H. Ericksen (eds), Quicksands: Foundational Histories in Australia and New Zealand, NSW University Press, 1999, pp. 176-98. For the latter, see the national policy document 'Growing an Innovative New Zealand', Wellington, Office of the Prime Minister, 2002.

(10.) Again, Michael King--bestselling local author, 'the Peoples Historian' for the The Listener in New Zealand, 10 April 2004, and, before his tragic death, a New Zealand Herald 'New Zealander of the year'--may be taken as representative: 'I never shared doubts about the legitimacy of the Pakeha presence in New Zealand. As far as I was and am concerned, my own people, descendants in the main of displaced Irish, had as much moral and legal right to be here as Maori. Like the ancestors of the Maori, they came as immigrants; like Maori too, we became indigenous at the point where our focus of identity and commitment shifted to this country and away from our countries and cultures of origin'; Being Pakeha Now, p. 235.

(11.) Hage's phrase in Paranoid Nationalism.

(12.) B. Barclay, Mana Taturu: Maori Treasures and Intellectual Property Rights, Auckland, Auckland University Press, 2005.

(13.) H. Moko Mead, Tikanga Maori: Living by Maori Values, Wellington, Huia Publishers, 2003.

(14.) I take the phrase 'first law' from Barry Barclay. Support for the existence of a mixed jurisdiction in Aotearoa/New Zealand, considered a country of two laws, can be found in P. Havemann (ed), Indigenous People's Rights in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand, Auckland, Oxford University Press, 1999, and D. Ivison, P. Patton and W. Sanders (eds), Political Theory and The Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000.

(15.) I refer, implicitly, to the seminal 1952 essay by Bill Pearson, 'Fretful Sleepers', reproduced in R. Brown (ed.), Great New Zealand Argument: Ideas about Ourselves, Auckland, Activity Press, 2005, pp. 47-96.

(16.) In one recent survey, an apparently academic study by Taruni Falconer, a lecturer in the Auckland University of Technology Communications Department, the characteristics of the Kiwi are described as earthiness, modesty, restraint, fairness, ingenuity and informality (as reported in The New Zealand Herald, 4 February 2006, Canvas magazine cover story, pp. 10-12). To understand how the drive to define the content of the national character reflects the insecurity of short history, and circumscribes the rich possibilities of being a New Zealander, consider that these 'values' presumably apply to Maori and other New Zealanders just the same.

(17.) See M. Williams and J. Stafford (eds), Maoriland: New Zealand Literature 1872-1914, Wellington, Victoria University Press, 2006.

(18.) For an example of this type of history, see J. Sissons, W. Wi Hongi, and P. Hohepa, Nga Pariri o Taiamai : A Political History of Nga Puhi in the Inland Bay of Islands, Auckland, Reed (in association with the Polynesian Society), 2001.

(19.) For example, the contested site of a prison built by the government at Nga wha in the north North Island sits on the place of springs that are sacred to Ngapuhi, and houses the taniwha Takauere--the acknowledged guardian of the waters of the area known as Taitokerau; Barclay, Mana Taturu, p. 196.

(20.) Just as Maori claims to place, based on long history, have raised deeper issues of constitutionality and cultural identity in the last decade, the writing of popular general histories of New Zealand has simultaneously sped up, as if to face off the challenge, with new histories by James Belich (two volumes, 1996 and 2001), Michael King (2003), Gordon McLauchlan (2004) and Philippa Mein Smith (2005).

(21.) Notably Trevor Mallard, in his first major speech as Co-ordinating Minister for Race Relations for Helen Clark's Labour government (to the Stout Research Centre for New Zealand Studies, 28 July 2004).

(22.) R. Walker's Ka Whawhai Tonu Matou: Struggle Without End, rev. edn, Auckland, Penguin, 2004, is effectively a history of Maori resistance to the administration of Maori by the government agencies of second settlers.

(23.) See the Foreshore and Seabed Act, Section 2.3 at <www.justice.govt.nz/foreshore/background.html>.

(24.) See the Prime Minster's media release 'Access Guaranteed to all New Zealanders', 7 April 2004, at <www.justice.govt.nz/foreshore/background.html>.

(25.) N. Thomas, Key Concepts of Tikanga Maori (Maori Custom Law) and their Use as Regulators of Human Relationships to Natural Resources in Tai Tokerau, Past and Present, PhD thesis, University of Auckland, 2006.

(26.) So Denis Dutton, an influential local commentator and academic, says in an op-ed piece for the New Zealand Herald: 'As National's leader Don Brash has pointed out, there are no racially pure Maori left in New Zealand. Some 70 per cent of 24 to 37-year-olds who call themselves Maori are married to non-Maori. Time, migration to cities, and intermarriage mean that Hobson has turned out to be right in a way he could not have envisioned. Of course, go back far enough and all New Zealanders are to some degree of mixed race'; 'Equality in Law above Racial Debate', New Zealand Herald, Comment, 4 March 2004.

(27.) This was the theme of an influential talk by Ani Mikaere for the annual Bruce Jesson Lecture at Auckland University (15 November 2004), 'Are We all New Zealanders Now? A Maori Response to the Pakeha Quest for Indigeneity': 'For Pakeha to gain legitimacy here, it is they who must place their trust in Maori, not the other way around. They must accept that it is for the tangata whenua to determine their status in this land, and to do so in accordance with tikanga Maori. This will involve sorting out a process of negotiation which is driven by the principles underpinning tikanga, a process Pakeha do not control ... Giving up such control requires a leap of faith on the part of Pakeha. In my view, however, nothing less will suffice if they truly want to gain the sense of belonging they so crave, the sense of identity that until now has proven so elusive'.

(28.) To give an example of new thinking about forms of governance that better reflect the history and peoples of the place, Roger Maaka and Augie Fleras argue in The Politics of Indigeneity: Challenging the State in Canada and Aotearoa New Zealand, Dunedin, Otago University Press, 2005, that 'living together differently', beyond biculturalism and multiculturalism, requires a new social contract constructed in bi-national terms.